


Bitter Fruit and Sweet

by shimotsuki



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-06
Updated: 2011-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-15 11:37:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shimotsuki/pseuds/shimotsuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Констанция Волынская's prompt:  <i>Bothari and Elena Visconti, AU where Bothari survives.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Bitter Fruit and Sweet

_“Lady...” he whispered. “You are still beautiful.”_

 _Don’t goad her, Sergeant! Miles screamed silently._

 _The Escobaran woman’s face contorted with rage and fear. She braced herself._

Without stopping to think about what his father would say—or his grandfather, or Bothari himself—Miles cannoned into the man who was oath-bound to protect him.

In the two seconds that it took to stand and cross the tiny cabin, he imagined the sting of needles piercing his helpless flesh about two dozen times. But the sting never came. Visconti held her fire.

Miles knew that his weight was not enough to knock Bothari over, but the Sergeant toppled like an oak, nonetheless. His head hit the floor with a sickening crunch, and his eyes slid closed.

Miles knelt, hunched over his fallen soldier, for another full second, until a grunt and a crash behind him snapped him back into a painful alertness. The needler scudded across the floor into his line of sight. He grabbed it, flipped the safety on, and sprang with a half-twist away from Bothari, landing on his feet. His left hand held the needler, pointing harmlessly downward; his right hand grabbed his stunner from Bothari’s work table.

An unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. Elena had Visconti’s arms twisted behind her back.

The Escobaran woman was breathing hard, her face suffused with with shock and rage. “Admiral Naismith! I tell you, I demand justice! I don’t care if that monster is your bodyguard. He is the most horrific kind of war criminal—he cannot be allowed to go free!”

Elena’s grip on the woman’s arms never slackened, but her eyes were great dark pools of anguish. “Miles—it’s not true, is it? It can’t be true...”

Her despair was a whirlpool, sucking him down. _No—no—_ he thought. _This is not the gift of knowledge I wanted to give you—_

“I don’t know everything about what the Sergeant did during the war,” he said, desperately feeling his way forward through uncharted hostile territory. In the dark. “I know he wasn’t well, in his mind, and that my—that Admiral Vorkosigan said some unscrupulous officers were, were encouraging him to act on his baser instincts.”

Elena flinched, and her eyes accused him. _You never told me this._

“But I know something else, too,” he pressed on. “Vorrutyer was going to torture my mother, and the Sergeant, um, stopped him.” This time his eyes met, and held, Visconti’s. “I think maybe what happened to you had something to do with that. My mother insists that Sergeant Bothari saved her life. That’s why she trusts _my_ life to him, I think.”

Elena stared. His words had done nothing to lessen the horror and pain in her eyes.

But Visconti’s eyes narrowed. “ _Naismith._ Your mother—your mother was Captain Cordelia Naismith?”

Now it was Miles’s turn to gape. “What?”

“She was the ranking officer in the women’s prison camp, while we waited for the bastard Barrayarans to negotiate our return.” Visconti frowned. “I liked her. Respected her. She wasn’t afraid, not even when Vorkosigan the Butcher showed a _personal_ interest in her.”

“I see,” Miles choked.

Bothari stirred, groaning a little. Visconti looked over at him, and her beautiful face twisted with loathing. But then she turned back to Miles and pressed her lips together. “If Captain Naismith thought that this monster deserved to live and breathe after that foul war, she must have had her reasons.”

“He carried me on his shoulders, when I couldn’t walk,” said Miles, trying not to plead. “He’s served my family loyally ever since the war.”

“All right.” Visconti shivered, and then turned her head around to look at Elena. “Let me go. I give you my word I won’t try to harm him—as long as he stays away from me.” Rage—and terror—darkened her face one last time. “But if he comes after me, I swear to God, I _will_ kill him.”

Miles breathed: once, twice. “Agreed. Let her go, Elena.”

Visconti rubbed her arms and slowly pivoted to face her erstwhile captor. “You have my name,” she said. “Elena.”

The two women stared at one another, something like recognition dawning in each pair of eyes.

Elena’s grew hungry. “If all this is true, then you are my—”

 _“No.”_ Visconti’s voice lashed across Elena’s hesitant words. “You stay away from me too. Do you hear me? I hever want to see that monster or his—his _spawn_ —again.”

She wheeled away, slammed her palm against the lock pad, and squeezed past the door before it had slid even halfway open.

Miles turned to Elena, but she was looking down at Bothari’s motionless form with an expression of revulsion that was entirely new. “My father is a rapist,” she whispered. “My mother is disgusted by the mere fact of my existence.”

“Elena—” he began, groping for words. But she pushed past him and out of the cabin before he could find a single one.

The door had barely closed behind her when it slid open again and Arde Mayhew came in. “My lord, about those assignments—” He looked from Miles, still clutching the stunner and Visconti’s needler, to Bothari, slumped on the floor. “What happened?”

“An accident,” said Miles. Indeed. The last of the adrenaline drained away, leaving him empty. He put down the needler, reholstered his stunner, and rubbed at his eyes. “Help me with the Sergeant, would you?”

~ * ~

Miles waited for Ivan in the dimly lit docking bay, with Bothari standing still and alert beside him as always. From the corner of his eye, he searched that hatchet-face for signs of anger, or regret, or—anything. In vain.

“Baz loves her,” he said, tentatively. “He’ll do anything to make her happy.”

Bothari stared ahead, unmoving.

A figure appeared at the far end of the docking bay, tall and slender. As the newcomer drew nearer, Bothari stiffened, and Miles squinted into the dimness.

Elena Visconti.

His hand went to the stunner in his holster, just in case. But she saw his gesture, and slowly raised her own hands to show that they were empty.

Her steps were silent as she came up to where they stood, next to the flex-tube that tethered their Felician fast courier to the ship. “Admiral Naismith,” she said, civilly. Then, as though the name were a foul taste in her mouth (it probably was), “Bothari.”

“Technician Visconti,” said Miles politely.

Bothari, perhaps wisely, said nothing aloud. But his eyes fixed on her face, burning with some sort of inner fire, even as his forehead crumpled with the pain of what Miles now knew to be a crippling headache.

She turned her back on her worst nightmare and faced Miles again.

“Elena told me you were leaving tonight,” she said.

Miles blinked. Visconti had spoken with Elena, after all?

“I think I have something to thank you for,” she went on. “It is worth something, after all, to know that I have a child in the galaxy. She—she seems like a good girl. And it means that something valuable came out of, of all that horror.”

“Lady,” said Bothari, in a hoarse whisper.

Visconti flinched, and instinctively drew closer to Miles, but she did turn to face the Sergeant.

Bothari stared at her with that same burning gaze. Its intensity was almost too much for even Miles to watch, and Visconti began to shiver, but she didn’t look away.

“I wronged you,” he said. “I can never make that up to you, except maybe with my life.”

She drew a breath. Miles put his hand on his stunner again, but she only waited, listening.

“I wanted to heal you.” He grimaced in pain, and rubbed at his head with one large, square hand. “I loved you.”

“That was no excuse,” Visconti whispered, “for what you did—what you _kept on doing._ ”

“Blood washes away sin,” he said. “That’s what the Coun—” he shot a look at Miles—“what Captain Naismith told me. I would bleed for you, lady. Do you have your needler now?”

“Armsman!” said Miles sharply. “You are oath-sworn, and you have _not_ been released!”

But Visconti looked sick. She shook her head and took a step away, holding her hands out as if to ward off an evil.

“There has been enough pain, and damage, and death,” she said. “I can’t forgive you, Bothari. Not now. Maybe never. But—Elena doesn’t deserve to lose the father who loved her. I no longer wish you dead.”

Miles let out the breath that he had been holding.

“I thank you for your compassion, Technician,” he said. “If there’s ever anything I can do for you—”

She turned to look at him. Impressively thoroughly. He tried not to squirm under her scrutiny, but he couldn’t stop the reflexive chin-jerk.

“I’ve done a little reading, recently,” she said, “about Captain Naismith’s life after the war.”

“Have you,” breathed Miles.

“Most interesting,” said Visconti. Her mouth twisted into what might have been a smile under different circumstances. “Please give your mother my regards. I suppose she knew what she was doing, going off to that benighted planet?”

“The benighted planet is in her debt,” said Miles. “But I think my mother would appreciate it if you kept my—my other name to yourself.”

Visconti gave him an ironic salute, and turned away for the last time, the dim light blurring her outline as she crossed the docking bay. Ivan, weaving slightly from his post-wedding revelry, passed her halfway across. He turned around to get a better look, but she ignored him completely. Miles couldn’t quite suppress a smirk.

Tung’s surgeon was right behind Ivan, leading Elli Quinn, and then there was a flurry of final instructions and preparations. Miles was steeling himself to walk away from all this, to give up his astonishing ersatz triumph and head home to face the all-too-real perils in the Council of Counts, when the sound of running footsteps made him freeze and turn around.

It was Elena, in her wedding-finery version of Dendarii dress greys, with Baz right behind her.

She stopped in front of her father. And looked _at_ him, rather than past him, for the first time since she’d learned about her mother.

“You were talking to her,” she whispered. “Did she forgive you?”

“No,” Bothari rumbled in his deep voice. Elena’s face started to turn to stone, but he went on, even though pain had begun to crease his brow again. “She did not forgive me, but she told me that I may live.”

Elena let this sink in. Baz caught her hand in his, and she held on.

“I’m still not going back to Barrayar,” she said. “Ever.”

Bothari winced, but he nodded. “I know. This is one more penance I must bear for my sins.”

Tears filled Elena’s eyes at that. “No,” she said, “no, I don’t mean—But I have found myself, now, and I want to keep me. To find out who I can be.” She turned to Miles. “Thank you for that. For the gift of myself.”

Miles cleared his throat and shook her hand, and then Baz’s. “Congratulations. To both of you.”

She hugged him, hard, with tears still in her eyes, and his mind was so full of the hug and the feel and the scent of her that he didn’t realize just how many Dendarii had filed into the docking bay until the lights suddenly switched on for day-cycle.

Hands reached, and touched, and then Miles was afloat on a sea of Dendarii. Or, on Elena and Baz’s shoulders, anyway. Hardly a bodyguard-approved situation.

Miles looked back at Bothari, expecting to see anger.

The Sergeant was in a ready stance, with one hand on his stunner, but if anything the expression on his sharp ugly face was resigned.

Perhaps he was getting used to letting go.

~ _fin_ ~

**Author's Note:**

> The first three lines are from _The Warrior's Apprentice,_ chapter 15.


End file.
